# On the uncertainty of self-supervised monocular depth estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.06209 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06209/

## Key facts

- Cited by 182 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 182)

- [UniDepthV2: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation Made Simpler](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20110/) (2025)
- [MonoViT: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with a Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03543/) (2022)
- [Estimating and Exploiting the Aleatoric Uncertainty in Surface Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09881/) (2021)
- [Boosting Monocular Depth Estimation Models to High-Resolution via Content-Adaptive Multi-Resolution Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14021/) (2021)
- [Lite-Mono: A Lightweight CNN and Transformer Architecture for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13202/) (2022)
- [NeRF On-the-go: Exploiting Uncertainty for Distractor-free NeRFs in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18715/) (2024)
- [Conditional-Flow NeRF: Accurate 3D Modelling with Reliable Uncertainty Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10192/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Scale-consistent Depth Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11610/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Internal Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09482/) (2021)
- [Robust Monocular Depth Estimation under Challenging Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09711/) (2023)
- [Fine-grained Semantics-aware Representation Enhancement for Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08829/) (2021)
- [Stereo Anywhere: Robust Zero-Shot Deep Stereo Matching Even Where Either Stereo or Mono Fail](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04472/) (2024)
- [Learning Multiple Dense Prediction Tasks from Partially Annotated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14893/) (2021)
- [Toward Practical Monocular Indoor Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02306/) (2021)
- [Sparse Auxiliary Networks for Unified Monocular Depth Prediction and Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16690/) (2021)
- [TiG-BEV: Multi-view BEV 3D Object Detection via Target Inner-Geometry Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13979/) (2022)
- [RA-Depth: Resolution Adaptive Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11984/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation: Let's Talk About The Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08357/) (2023)
- [Learning Depth Estimation for Transparent and Mirror Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15052/) (2023)
- [Booster: a Benchmark for Depth from Images of Specular and Transparent Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08245/) (2023)
- [Not Just Streaks: Towards Ground Truth for Single Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10779/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models for Monocular Depth Estimation: Overcoming Challenging Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16698/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation in Highly Complex Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13137/) (2021)
- [Atlantis: Enabling Underwater Depth Estimation with Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12471/) (2023)
- [Sparsity Agnostic Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00790/) (2022)
- [Gradient-based Uncertainty for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02005/) (2022)
- [MUAD: Multiple Uncertainties for Autonomous Driving, a benchmark for multiple uncertainty types and tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01437/) (2022)
- [Monitored Distillation for Positive Congruent Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16034/) (2022)
- [Bayesian Deep Basis Fitting for Depth Completion with Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15254/) (2021)
- [Learning the Distribution of Errors in Stereo Matching for Joint Disparity and Uncertainty Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00152/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-supervised paradigms for monocular depth estimation are very appealing since they do not require ground truth annotations at all. Despite the astonishing results yielded by such methodologies, learning to reason about the uncertainty of the estimated depth maps is of paramount importance for practical applications, yet uncharted in the literature. Purposely, we explore for the first time how to estimate the uncertainty for this task and how this affects depth accuracy, proposing a novel peculiar technique specifically designed for self-supervised approaches. On the standard KITTI dataset, we exhaustively assess the performance of each method with different self-supervised paradigms. Such evaluation highlights that our proposal i) always improves depth accuracy significantly and ii) yields state-of-the-art results concerning uncertainty estimation when training on sequences and competitive results uniquely deploying stereo pairs.